The September Agile KC meeting will be held at Centriq Training Center
on Thursday September 29 , 2011 at 6:30 PM. Please visit AgileKC.org
for a map to Centriq

The meeting topic: Capturing and Quantifying Project Risks - a Novel Approach
Every project experiences some degree of risks. In some cases the majority of the project management and oversight deals with defining, mitigating and tracking project risks. Risk is also the enemy of one of the main tenants of Agile; predictability. How does your team manage the project risks? What has worked for you in the past and
what hasn't? Think about it and bring your thoughts to Centirq on
September 29th, 2011 at 6:30 PM and we can discuss capturing, quantifying and mitigating project risks.

Martin Olson will present a novel way of exploring, comparing and sizing project risks with the team. The presentation will consist of an group exercise and discussion with a key focus on what *you* can do to help facilitate and get the most out of these types of
conversations. The approach can also be used in a variety of
different situations like story planning and sizing.

Martin Olson has been working with Agile for a number of years and tries to make an annual attendance at the Agile Alliance conference.
This year's conference was in Salt Lake City, Utah and was where Martin explored this approach with some of the folks from Rally
Software. Intrigued? Hope you can join us.

PLEASE NOTE: This will not be a dinner meeting so please plan on eating before you arrive. We'll have some time at the end of the presentation for an open forum.
Hope to see you there!

A week from this Saturday (Oct 1st) we're going to have our next
meeting.

2 PM, KC public library plaza branch, large meeting room (by the cow).
You are allowed to buy coffee at the cafe there and bring it in to the
library.
Brian is scheduled to present on ggplot2, but I haven't heard back
from him. Brian, are you ready? I'm going to assume everything is
fine, but everyone else feel free to bring along anything you have to
show or discuss.

A unique opportunity to hear the information delivered at VMworld.
Join us for a complimentary, half-day program to offer your organization the tools to deliver unprecedented IT simplicity, agility, flexibility and cost efficiency. At this special event you will get a sampling of the highlights of VMworld 2011 and how organizations are defining their cloud strategy and business transformation efforts.

Attend and learn from VMware Subject Matter Experts how to modernize your IT operations. Improve, simplify and save with VMware. Topics to be discussed include: • VMware Keynote Review / General Session Highlights
• Build and Own Your Cloud: vSphere™ 5.0, vCloud™ Director 1.5, vCenter™ SRM 5 and vShield™ 5
•Desktop and End User Computing Strategies
•See live demos as well as network with your peers
This is a unique opportunity to learn and understand more about the infrastructure, applications and end user transformations that are making organizations more automated, competitive and agile. A well planned cloud computing strategy will be your organization’s strategic weapon – not just for IT – but to enable full business transformation. It will eventually change how the business operates.

Our next meeting will be held:
6:30 PM, Wed, September 28, 2011
Centriq Training Center
8700 State Line Rd, Leawood, KS
(West side of State Line Rd, directly across from Ward Parkway Mall)
Sponsor: TBD TBD
Food and door prizes will be provided by : TBD TBD

In order to ensure that we have enough food for you, please click *REPLY* to this email, and let Ray Harris know if you will be attending. Thanks very much !

This month's topic will be two-fold:

(#1) How to Accomplish What Hibernate Does in 20 Lines of Code (speaker: Ray Harris)
-- Learn special techniques to take Rapid Application Development (RAD) to a whole new level
-- Eliminate the need for using NHibernate on ASP.NET projects
-- Special guests will be attending: Gert Haegdorens and Ken Roberts
-- Gert, Ken and Ray worked on the same project where we developed this technique for a parti! cular client

(#2) Perform Geocoding and Distance Calcs on your website and save $10,000 Per Year (speaker: Ray Harris)
-- GOOGLE charges $10,000 per year to use their Geocoding service
-- Learn how to 'roll your own' code to geocode on your own platform
-- Expose this service through Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)
Ray Harris's BIO:
Ray has been in the IT industry for 16 years. He has functioned as a software analyst, developer, project manager and software architect in the transportation arena; mutual fund financial services arena; health provider and insurance arena; mechanical engineering arena; video, voice and data cable provider arena; and most recently, the IT Benchmarking arena. Ray has experience in all areas of software development and architecture including COBOL/DB2 batch data processing, client server data processing and internet web applications in both the Microsoft .NET and Java/J2EE environm! ents. He was the project leader for several conversions on the! mutual fund data processing environment of DST Systems, including the Russell Funds, (a $2.4 Trillion Investment firm) - creator of the Russell 2000 Index. Ray has experience as the lead java architect on the Suddenlink Inc. (a 1.4 million customer cable company) Customer Selfcare Portal system, and the ITHC Benchmarking system. He was also the technical lead on several other projects: the Wells Dairy Blue Bunny ice cream website, the Burger King restaurant management portal, the HNTB (a $4 Billion Mechanical Enginering firm) Engineering Sales/Marketing/Project management website, the Simon Malls vendor/partner management website, and the QWEST circuit pricing project. Ray is also an instructor at Johnson County Community College and Penn Valley Community College. Ray graduated from the United States Air Force Academy in 1985 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering and a minor in Mathematical Sciences. Ray received his Master of Science degree in Electr! ical Engineering in 1990 from Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. Currently, Ray is the Lead Software Architect for iTHC, LLC an industry leading IT benchmarking and assessment organization.
________________________________________
Our website URL is: http://www.kcwebpros.com
See You There !!!
Ray Harris

We have not discussed digital photography in awhile. There are a number of utilities available to handle digital images fir editing and cataloging. One interesting free utility can help with making panoramic photos even for cameras that lack the capability so bring your cameras and USB sticks.
As usual there will be a question and answer session for general or specific questions.

Date: 9/20/2011 6:30 PM - 9 PM
Where: New Horizons Computer Learning Center Metcalf South Shopping Center 96th& Metcalf, Overland Park, KS (Please enter the door of Metcalf South on the lower level of the shopping center on the West - You will find New Horizons inside the center area.)
Room: 6 see a map at
www.newhorizonskc.com

HUG Access SIG Meeting 6:30 pm, Sept 21st, 2011 at JCCC, Regnier 2nd Floor
Beginners Presentation CHANGE:
Earl Long's presentation is rescheduled for October 19th
Caren Grandgenett will be presenting "Creating custom tabs, etc in 2010". She is an Adjunct Assistant Professor, Business Entrepreneurship and Technology Johnson County Community College

Advanced Presentation:
The advanced presentation will be given by Jim Watkins of Heritage Computer Consulting & Services. He will be showing a commercial database that has been developed for a client of HCCS. The database is designed to consolidate multiple Excel workbooks into a single multi-user Access database complete with functionality to replace the formulas that are such a core value of Excel workbooks. Come to see Excel Formula functionality in an Access Database.

Jim Watkins is a senior developer for Heritage Computer Consulting & Services, Inc. HCCS is a 20 year Computer Consulting located in Overland Park, Kansas specializing in providing custom solutions to real world challenges for their clients.

Give-away:
Teach Yourself Visually by Faithe Wempen A visual step-by-step book that demonstrates 185 plus Access 2010 tasks. Get up and running with Access 2010 in no time.

Time: October 11, 2011 from 11am to 12:30pm
Location: Microsoft Offices
Organized By: Dennis Chepurnov
Event Description:
Is Your Network Ready for the Cloud?The Role of the Network in Cloud-basedDelivery
Presenter: Bart Rogers, Manager Network Application Engineering, tw telecom
tw telecom will be presenting the role ofnetwork in support of cloud-based service delivery. When deciding to deploy or leverage applications and services via cloud architecture, it is important to understand the business needs and how the network will meet those needs with proper availability and customer experience. Bart will focus on attributes of public Internet and private network solutions todeliver applications:

Network Infrastructure beyond the premise
Access to my business and to the world
Control and prioritization
Monitoring
Security

Venture Fridays is a simple but fun concept: The startup culture of Kansas City and surrounding areas is invited to gather at our private office lounge to discuss what we’re all thinking about, working on, needing help with, and might do for each other. Existing or aspiring entrepreneurs of all types and ages are invited. Let’s raise our glasses to building the entrepreneurial culture beyond ourselves.
Doors are open on Rainbow Boulevard (Westwood, Kan.) 4 to 6 p.m. on the 2nd Friday of every month. Who are your hosts? We’re a web marketing metacompany, still whiffing the baby powder of our start in 2009. We work hard, and we play hard. Sometimes Venture Fridays will be co-located with other events, sometimes not. Either way, we’ll be here drinking and thinking. Will you? Drop in.

No soliciting or mooching please (entrepreneurial mojo required; read more in Discussions).

Want to present your idea, get feedback, or find testers? Have an idea for an awesome entrepreneurial jam? We invite startup stimulation. Contact Carrie at Red Nova Labs.

We’ll be meeting at the CCCKC Hacker space at 2 PM
Directions:
Cowtown Computer Congress
3101 Mercier, Suite 404
Kansas City, MO 64111 (map)
There are lots of cool things in store for this month's meetup, including our featured talk by Zach Kelling (@zeekay) about “Bottle” a fast, simple and lightweight WSGI micro web-framework for Python. (http://bottlepy.org/docs/dev/)
We also have a few scheduled Lightning talks from Julia Elman (@juliaelman) and Steven Cummings (@estebistec) on the status of pythonkc.com and the meetup.com api wrapper Steven wrote; Andrew Schoen (@andrewschoen) on the benefits of reading source code and Juan Gomez (@_juandg) with an “all-about-PyCon 2012” Lightning talk.

There’s still space for more lighting talks, so if you have a topic you want to share with everybody on Saturday, prepare a small lighting talk (5 to 10 minutes) and tell us all about it!
We're very happy to announce our new group sponsor: O’Reilly Media (http://oreilly.com/). They have activated a special discount for our members through our meetup.com page and they have also generously given us a free eBook voucher that will be raffled this Saturday among all attendees! We also have a review eBook copy of “Programming Python, 4ed” by Mark Lutz that will be given away between our lighting talk speakers, so get cranking on that slide deck and make it yours!
Hope to see everybody on Saturday. (Remember to RSVP at the meetup.com page)

HUG Access SIG Meeting 6:30 pm, Sept 21st, 2011 at JCCC, Regnier 2nd Floor
Beginners Presentation:
By Earl Long "Using a Multiselect List Box as a Query Parameter" from Tip 6 "Access Solutions" by Arvin Meyer and Douglas J. Steele. This example improves the user interface, where the user frequently needs multiple criteria to obtain the data he needs. Some of the techniques used are 1) Saved queries that have no tables; 2) Two list boxes that are populated after the user makes a selection from an initial list box.

Advanced Presentation:
The advanced presentation will be given by Jim Watkins of Heritage Computer Consulting & Services. He will be showing a commercial database that has been developed for a client of HCCS. The database is designed to consolidate multiple Excel workbooks into a single multi-user Access database complete with functionality to replace the formulas that are such a core value of Excel workbooks. Come to see Excel Formula functionality in an Access Database.

Jim Watkins is a senior developer for Heritage Computer Consulting & Services, Inc. HCCS is a 20 year Computer Consulting located in Overland Park, Kansas specializing in providing custom solutions to real world challenges for their clients.

Give-away:
Teach Yourself Visually by Faithe Wempen A visual step-by-step book that demonstrates 185 plus Access 2010 tasks. Get up and running with Access 2010 in no time.

What's a GeekLunch?
A GeekLunch is two hour long presentations with a 30 minute lunch / networking time in between.
What's it cost?
It's free. AJI Software is presenting GeekLunch for your education and entertainment! AJI Software offers a wide variety of consulting, mentorings, and training solutions and services focused around Microsoft Technologies and Agile Development. We also run the largest technical blogging community in the world with over 3,000 bloggers - Check it out at geekswithblogs.net!
Who's Speaking?
James Hare has been a software developer in the industry for over 18 years. He tries to maintain a trifecta of languages (C++, Java, C#) though lately the majority of his focus has been on C# development. James is very passionate about standards and good programming practices and the art of writing maintainable code which is why he has been heavily involved in application architecture and code standards at his current employer, Scottrade. James also loves mentoring new developers and writing reusable software components.
Check out James' blog at geekswithblogs.net/BlackRabbitCoder.
What's the agenda?
Check in / Networking
10:00 AM - 10:30 AM
Session One - The "Little Pitfalls" of C#
10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
The C# language is a wonderful framework for producing high-quality code with a very fast time-to-market – probably more so than any of its predecessors! That said, there are little nuances of the language that can occasionally be a stumbling block if you aren’t aware of them. This session discusses those issues and how to remediate them.
Lunch / Networking
11:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Session Two -The "Little Wonders" of .NET
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

The .NET Framework is full of “macro-sized” goodness that we all love and know. But, the .NET Framework also has a lot of smaller “micro-sized” tips and tricks that can improve code. This presentation focuses on those “Little Wonders” of the .NET Framework that make our lives easier in big ways.

In October, we’ll be back to our regularly scheduled breakfasts at Kansas City Cafe. We’ll be joined by Water.org, a non-profit organization that is doing some terrific work bringing safe drinking water and sanitation to people in developing countries. Water.org was recently featured in a great piece in Fast Company.

Come meet two of KC’s biggest tech startups of the year, Zaarly and FrontFlip. While Zaarly has been picking up steam since their May launch, FrontFlip launches in late September. Find out what both groups are up to at the rapidly growing startup factory, Red Nova Labs, who is graciously providing food and drinks for SMCKC. If you’ve been to their Venture Fridays, you know they keep the bar well stocked.

Join us for the next meeting of the CRMUG Kansas City Regional Chapter at the Microsoft office in Overland Park, KS. This is a prime opportunity to troubleshoot your most pressing Dynamics CRM issues, learn from the experience of other users in your area, share your knowledge and experiences, and make valuable connections with local users who share similar goals, priorities and CRM objectives.
Meeting Date & Time: Thursday, September 15, 2011 from 8:30am - 12:00pm CT